Muslim students at UNC Asheville learned to deal with post-9/11 reaction

UNCA group touts tolerance

Sep. 7, 2011

From left, Fatima Faridi, Sundas Hussain, and Amarra Ghani gather with fellow students in the Muslim Student Association at UNC Asheville on Wednesday afternoon. / John Fletcher/jfletcher@citizen-times.com

Written by

Barbara Blake

ASHEVILLE — In the hours after the twin towers fell on Sept. 11, 2001, schoolchildren throughout New York City and eastern New Jersey were fetched from their classrooms by parents fearful the attacks would continue.

One of them was Amarra Ghani, a Brooklyn-born, 12-year-old whose father, of Pakistani heritage, hurried to his daughter’s middle school to walk her home, coughing as smoke blowing west from lower Manhattan swirled into Jersey.

“We were about to cross the street when a red car passed by,” said Ghani, a senior journalism major at UNC Asheville and president of its Muslim Student Association. “The driver spat at my dad and told him to ‘go back where you came from.’”

Utterly confused and trembling with fear as she clutched her father’s hand, the girl didn’t know what to do, how to feel.

“My heart was beating so fast, it still stings me to this day,” Ghani said quietly. “I felt tears running down my face. … Why did that man tell my dad to go back where he came from? We came from Brooklyn.”

Ghani’s recollections of that terrible day and the days and months that followed are surely mirrored by countless college-age students of Middle Eastern descent who were then in elementary or middle school.

Their memories are starkly different than those of their peers with naturally blonde hair and genealogical ties to the Mayflower.

For many students whose fathers had dark skin and mustaches, whose mothers wore hijab — scarves around their heads — post-9/11 life would never be the same.

“A few Muslim girls in my neighborhood who wore hijab stopped wearing it, and one of the Muslim men I knew changed his name,” Ghani said. “My dad filled up his car with a bunch of American flags and ‘I am proud to be an American’ bumper stickers, but that didn’t prevent the hoodlums from keying my dad’s car in the city.”

Standing in solidarity

When Ghani transferred to UNC Asheville from a community college in Charlotte last year, she founded the Muslim Student Association partly as a way of familiarizing the larger campus community with her Islamic culture and faith — a first step in furthering tolerance and acceptance.

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She was happily surprised to see that in addition to other Muslim students, the ranks of the organization also began filling with students of Christian, Jewish and other faiths, standing in solidarity with their Muslim peers.

“It’s funny, because when we started (MSA), the first people who were behind us were HOLA (Hispanic outreach learning awareness) Alliance and (gay and lesbian) groups,” Ghani said. “They fully supported us, and so many people tell me it’s great to have MSA on campus because no one really knew that Muslims even existed here.”

Maayan Schechter, who is the Muslim Student Association’s outreach coordinator and is of Jewish heritage, said the UNCA chapter of the organization is trying to break a tradition of disharmony between Jewish and Muslim student organizations on college campuses nationwide, stemming from issues such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

In reality, Schechter said, the events of 9/11 had nothing to do with religious faith.

“Muslims did not kill on 9/11 — radicals did,” she said. “The way Muslim men and women are treated today reminds me of the term, ‘scapegoat.’ While 9/11 was an extremely unfortunate tragedy on American soil, holding one religion as the cause will only hurt religious progress in this country,” she said.

Change takes time

Tasnim Tabaileh, a junior at UNCA and a native of Palestine, said she has seen progress in the last few years in terms of acceptance of her “difference,” including her decision to continue wearing hijab after moving to Hendersonville in 2008.

“There are some nice people who will talk to me and try to get to know me without making the hijab a wall between them and I,” Tabaileh said. “I have been working at Ingles for three years, and people are now used to me, and I have some nice regular customers who ask about me if they don’t see me on my regular days.”

There was the woman who refused to allow Tabaileh to bag her groceries, saying she “didn’t want me to touch her things.”

But then there are the customers who were so worried when Tabaileh took two weeks off during final exams that the store manager called her in.

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“I asked him what was wrong, and he said there was a customer who wanted to make sure that I was still working,” Tabaileh said. “Then the manager told me not to ever take two weeks off without telling my regular customers, because they had been asking about me.”

Tabaileh said she considered taking her head cover off after the first six months in Hendersonville, where she attended Blue Ridge Community College before transferring to Asheville-Buncombe Technical Community College and ultimately UNCA. It was a lonely time, when students avoided her initially.

“But I decided not to (remove her head scarf), because this is me, this is who I am, and if people would not talk to me because of it, then I don’t need them to be around me,” she said. “Eventually, the students started to talk to me .”

A proud Muslim and American

Fatima Faridi, a Brooklyn native who was a fourth-grader at PS 203 on 9/11, said she feels fortunate to have escaped much of the anti-Islam sentiment that swept the nation after the terrorist attacks.

“If anything, I felt that New Yorkers were united that day and immediately afterward,” said Faridi, a sophomore at UNCA. “I was recognized by my peers as a New Yorker — and an American — and it was clear that they understood that the 9/11 attacks were catastrophic in my eyes as well.

“In my neighborhood, different faiths and nationalities all came together to help one another in the suffering,” she said.

Faridi said that while she didn’t experience any major negative after-effects, “many Muslim Americans in New York, Asheville and nationwide were unfairly blamed and subjected to varying levels of discrimination.”

“American Muslims are just that — proud Americans and proud Muslims,” she said. “The heinous acts of 9/11 were disgusting to all Americans. … Islam, a religion practiced peacefully by over a billion people worldwide, is not represented by the small extremist sect responsible for the attacks on our nation that day.”

Hope for the future

Ghani’s experiences in the years following 9/11 were not as pleasant, beginning with her return to middle school a few days after the attacks, when the friends she had made at the beginning of the school year just a couple of weeks earlier suddenly ignored her.

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“I finally got one girl’s attention and she told me nervously, ‘I can’t talk to people like you,’” Ghani recalled. “I went to the bathroom to cry my eyes out, wondering, what did I do to her? I wanted to fit in so badly, I would do anything to make them want to be my friends again.”

What followed for years afterward were hateful stares, suspicious looks and snarled comments.

She grew angrier through the years, seeing firsthand and hearing stories of discrimination against not just Muslims but anyone who appeared to be of Middle Eastern heritage. And the anger extended to the terrorists themselves.

“Those men not only hijacked the planes, they hijacked my religion,” Ghani said.

She has gentled her anger in recent years, becoming more philosophical about those who still stare at her headcover or cast their eyes away with suspicion.

“It’s like I’m a celebrity — I always joke with my friends, saying maybe I’ll wave at the next batch of people who can’t stop staring at me,” Ghani said. “But I don’t get frustrated the way I used to when it would happen to me. I say to myself, people are curious, and why wouldn’t they be? Don’t you look at someone when they look different than you, and wonder about them, too?”

She is devout in her religious beliefs, and longs for a time when the world understands that her faith is based on peace, not terror.

“I believe that the Muslims who are part of al-Qaida or other terrorist organizations are just a bunch of men who are corrupted and need something to blame their actions on, and only make up a very, very, very small percent of Muslims,” she said.

“The rest of us are true Muslims; when a Muslim greets another Muslim, you are to say, ‘asalaaamuleikhum,’ which is literally translated as ‘Peace be upon you,’” Ghani said.